


Death of A Young Son By Drowning

by Go0se



Series: Whoever's At Home [1]
Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: Canon Compliant, Child Abandonment, Dysfunctional Family, Family, Gen, Medication, Mental Health Issues, Mental Institutions, Mother-Son Relationship, Non-Graphic Violence, of a sort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-01
Updated: 2014-03-01
Packaged: 2018-01-13 05:31:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1214509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Go0se/pseuds/Go0se
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It wasn't that Janet didn't love her son.  It all just got to be too much.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Death of A Young Son By Drowning

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from a poem of the same name by Margaret Atwood. It wasn't strictly an inspiration but was something I kept in mind while writing this. You can read the poem [ here ](http://www.poetryinvoice.com/poems/death-young-son-drowning).

-

For the first four years after she left Timothy at the hospital they had sent her monthly updates in sterile envelopes; letters detailing his behaviour, current diagnosis, prognosis, and medications. Every few months they would include a picture. She kept these envelopes in a box under her bed, like a child hiding a secret.  
  
Looking back, she might've expected Timothy's illness if she'd been thinking about it. Even before his falls, Timothy had never really been a normal child; his moodiness, the random bursts of anger worse than other little boys', his lack of desire to play normally, the way he never really connected with other children, his imaginary friends that scared him instead of giving him someone to talk to. All of these were warning signs that she missed, purposefully turning a blind eye or not she couldn't say.  
It had been hard, but she'd loved him anyway, and she had tried. Lord she had tried.  
And then his falls, and the subsequent doctor visits; the guts-deep horror of learning your child had seizures and you couldn't do anything at all to prevent them. The medication he hated taking for the seizures and the ones for his headaches, the tea that was supposed to help with his sleep and then more medication after the tea didn't work.  
It hadn't been nearly enough.

The night that she'd finally realized that it wasn't enough had been a particularly dark one. It'd only been two weeks after one of Timothy's run-aways; he'd to be brought home by the police that time. Her patience had been frail to begin with. He'd been having one of his tantrums, even though at eight years old he should have outgrown them. He had been screaming hysterically on the floor of the kitchen and pointing down the hall at nothing. She had already given him medication for his headache before dinner and he'd said he'd felt better, so at the time she'd just thought that he didn't want to go to bed. She'd gone over to him and picked him up over her shoulder like he was still a toddler, and he'd reached over her to grab the knife she'd been cutting apples in half with and he'd cut her.    
It hurt enough to make her drop him, out of surprise and pain, and shock enough for her to be looking down at him when he raised his head again and maybe he was looking down the hallway instead of at her but his face was still pure anger, not like a child at all.  
That had spooked her. She'd just left him there, on the floor, hurrying down the short hallway herself with nothing on her mind except stopping the blood she could feel dripping down her shoulder. In the dingy light of the bathroom she rinsed it off, put on witch hazel and a band aid, clumsily. Then she sat on the edge of the bathtub with her head in her hands.  
The cut was just a scratch, as it turned out; Timothy had barely managed to break her skin, but the fact that now on top of everything else, that along with all these other problems he was now  _violent..._  
For a couple of minutes the only sounds in the bathroom were the thud of the upstairs neighbours' stereo and her own muffled breathing. Then a cry sounded down the hall, startled and concerned; she heard Timothy shuffle down the hallway in his socks.  
Without thinking, she had surged up to lock the door.  
Not seconds later the knob twisted, and then he'd knocked, and asked in his high confused voice what had happened, that he was sorry. When she didn't answer, he knocked again, his voice wobbling.  Janet cradled her head in her hands.   
He'd stayed outside the door for at least twenty minutes, according to her watch. She'd stayed where she was, staring dully at the line of his medications set up on the back of the sink next to his Spiderman toothbrush. Thinking,  _We can't do this anymore._ I  _can't do this anymore._  
  
Timothy had still had the headache the next morning; it was easy enough to pretend that that was why she loaded them into the car and headed to the hospital. The large bag full of his clothes and his one stuffed bear would've been harder to explain, but Timothy wasn't paying much attention to the backseat while they drove.  
He did start noticing things again when she walked him into the clinic. He'd clung to her hand when the nurse asked him the long list of questions. She remembered how she'd picked him up and held him like he was four while the doctors had signed his admission paperwork and gotten him his ID bracelet.  
  
The air outside the hospital had settled coldly inside her lungs when she got out. Her cigarette had turned out not to help.  
On the ride home she'd been almost sick with the air so quiet, no one else breathing but her; the apartment's living room had seemed utterly empty. For months she'd felt the emptiness, always, at the back of her mind like a vertical drop behind her wherever she went.  But more than that she'd felt the creeping, monstrous  _relief_. Lord help her, things had been so much  _easier_ without Timothy in the house. Her sleep evened out again. She was promoted at her work, actually promoted. (Before then the most her boss had interacted with her was when she'd been reprimanded for sleeping on the job, after Timothy's night terrors had kept both of them awake until 4a.m). Because of the promotion, as well as needing less groceries and not renewing Timothy's medications every month, money got easier. Since she was getting more sleep and was less stressed her migraines stopped. The coughing fits stayed for a while longer but when she quit smoking for real (after trying countless times in the past), those went away too.  
Overall she was healthier, performing better. She had cautiously started forming a better outlook on her life than she'd had in... years.

  
The hospital had visiting hours for parents. They were unbearable for her. How do you look into your eight year old child's face when you know,  _you know_ that your life is better without him? Especially when the issues that he's facing aren't getting any better? Every month a new envelope was sent to her, a new problem. Timothy was consistently distracted by nothing, even from things as simple as eating lunch. Sometimes he was dangerous both to himself and others. The running away, the hallucinations, the sleeplessness had all gotten worse.  
How was she supposed to bring him home like that? How could he go back to school or make friends or do anything a regular child could, with those problems? There was nothing she could do to help him by herself. Nothing.  
Eventually she stopped visiting.  
  
  
She hadn't been able to avoid telling his old teachers why she'd pulled him out and wouldn't be sending him back. The judgement on their faces stung more than it should have. She had never had a good reputation around town: at first she'd been one of the girls who got 'into trouble' too young, and then she'd been the mother of the sick boy, quickly becoming the mother of the  _delusional_ boy. Other parents would talk behind her back in the school parking lot.  
It only got worse when she'd became the woman who'd had her son locked up. People avoided her. Her old friend, Angela, asked one day in an honestly curious tone whether she had loved Timothy at all.  
  
Like it was that simple. Like she'd  _forgotten_ him. No one could understand any of it, why she'd done it, or how she felt--- there were reminders of him everywhere, inside her mind and outside. Two months after she'd signed him over to the state there were still pre-packaged burritos in the back of the freezer; she couldn't stand them but they'd been Timothy's favourite. She'd moved the living room furniture around that July and found a duotang of his old music homework under the couch. She kept waking up early and looking outside for a school bus that had no reason to come anymore, waking up at night half out of her bed already because she was convinced she'd heard him yelling.  
  
It was too much.  
  
  
The year Timothy turned twelve she visited him again for the first time in years. The heavy antiseptic smell, the serious face of the doctors, and the sense of unease in the walls was all the same. It'd been so cold that day. Timothy had looked nervous; he'd grown. They had walked for the allotted hour by the edge of the picturesque forest that the hospital was surrounded by, neither of them saying anything much. Timothy made several cut-off motions, like he was trying to work up courage to take her hand.

When the hour was over she'd said goodbye to him, walked out of the ward, and followed a short hallway down to a social worker's office. They spoke for a long time, going through form after official form. And then she'd left.  
The receptionists and nurses at the hospital had always pushed her to request more visits with Timothy, but when she had walked past them for the last time after signing away her parental rights to her son, full of an emotion she couldn't name, they hadn't said a single word. There was a part of her that hated them for that.  
  
A couple weeks later she got the last update letter she ever would from the hospital (since she no longer had legal ties to her son). She held it in the middle of her quiet kitchen before putting it unopened in the same box as all the other envelopes.  
  
When she got back from work that afternoon she stuck the box in the trunk of her car, buried it under everything else she owned, and drove up to her cousins' house in Columbus with her hands shaking on the wheel.

  
Her life didn't stop after she left Alabama anymore than it had stopped when she'd first had Timothy admitted. Or when she'd first had Timothy, for that matter. It was a fresh start, her second, albeit this time with her having ten more years of experiences and regrets behind her and no baby in her arms. Ohio was cold when she got there but it warmed in the summers. She got a better coat. Her cousin was supportive and kind and didn't ask many questions.  She stayed with her cousin for a while, eventually finding a new job and her own apartment in the city. Friends and acquaintances started filling out her days. People she didn't consider herself knowing became familiar faces, smiling at her if they saw her on the way to work. She decided to pick up fluting again.  
The time passed by.

After six years she found herself hovering around the phone in her apartment whenever she was home, checking her cellphone compulsively every few minutes when she was out.  She lingered longer in the frozen food section of the grocery store without even realizing she was doing it. The fact that Timothy was of age and would be formally released from the hospital was in her mind, of course. When she found herself typing his name into Facebook's search engine she finally accepted that she was expecting him to look for her.   
It had been six years since she'd last seen her son. She waited for a knock on the door, a call from an unknown number with a familiar state area code. She waited for Timothy say one way or another that he hated or forgave her. But he never showed up on her doorstep, and the call never came.  
  
He'd be almost twenty-one by now.

//


End file.
